After designing and developing your word press site, there are several things you need to do before you allow it to go live. From checking your content and web page elements thoroughly to setting up a plan for marketing your site, the list below will help you do some of the essential things necessary before you launch your site.

Be Happy With What You Post

You should ensure that you are satisfied with the quality of content on your site by taking the time to proofread it, checking all page links, and removing any “filler” content and space-filling photos or images which are not performing any useful function. Check your media files (audio and video) and make sure they play without a hitch. Host your video files (which usually take up a large amount of space) on an external file sharing site like YouTube. Look at the size of your image files and compress them so they use less bandwidth while downloading. Finally, get one or two friends to take a second look at your site and make sure everything is perfect before the launch date.

View Your Website in Popular Browsers and Devices

Your website visitors will be viewing your website on different browsers and mobile devices. So it is important to do a test of your website with the most popular web browsers and hand-held devices. You can use browsers like Google Chrome, Firefox, Safari, and Opera to load your website and ensure that it is compatible with each browser. Next, use at least two mobile devices to test the content. You may use a smartphone with a 4 or 5″ screen and a tablet with an 8 or 10″ screen to view your content and make that your site responds well to the changes in screen size. Google’s mobile-friendly test can also give you good feedback.

Ensure that Your Website’s Elements Are Functioning Perfectly

Test all the critical elements on your web pages. Be sure that your forms authenticate and submit the correct data to you so you can reach your prospects and customers fast. To receive feedback and messages, you also need to ensure that the emails you send are going to the correct addresses. Check out the type of auto-responders you can afford to use. Make sure all the text your users will see on the auto-response page is exactly what you intend. Additionally, you should examine how well your website functions in terms of speed. You can do a word press site speed test to discover any parts of your site that are loading slowly.

Use a Plugin for Your SEO

If you are serious about achieving a top ranking in Google’s search results pages, you should use a good SEO plugin. Yoast SEO is a reliable plugin and it has most of the features you will need to configure to fulfill requirements for good web page optimization. With this plugin, you can set up your Google search title, and post titles and tagline which will show up in search results. Before your site goes live, check to see if search engines have been prevented from crawling and indexing your site. Only allow search engine spiders to crawl or index your site after it has been launched.

Create a Plan to Market Your Site

It is not enough for you to launch an attractive and functional website, it must also be well publicized for it to attract the desired traffic. Elements like social icons and newsletter signup sections must be included in the site design before launch. Place the signup form at the base of the page and use it to build an email list so you can easily communicate with your target audience and build trust. Your social outreach should be properly configured so your users can like you on Facebook and follow you on Twitter. So set up all your social accounts properly so you can enjoy the combined effect of SEO and social media marketing.

Those are some of the important things to do before you launch your word press site. Remember to set up proper admin logins and setup automatic backup for your site.

LightHouse Graphics specializes in several areas of online presence such as graphic design, website design, and social media marketing and content creation…just to name a few. If your business needs assistance in any of these areas, give us a call. We’d love to work with you.